TALL ANEMONE 



Anemone vicginiana L. 



June Tliis is, perhaps, the stiffest and least heautiful of all the 



Woods anemones. Yet because beauty is a comparative quality, the 

 tall aneirone might be called most beautiful of its tribe if the 

 others were less ornamental than they are. In the mosaic of the leaf- 

 pattern, in the tall, stiff, downy stems, in the small, green, downy star 

 which is the flower — a star of petals enclosing a globe of pistils and 

 stamens — there is a certain beauty which belongs to the Illinois wood- 

 lands in mid-June. 



Now it is high summer, hot, buiniil, with long days and short warm 

 nights a-sing with tree crickets and whi])-poor-wills. There is a certain 

 polished brown oak leaf over a little way in the leaf-strewn floor of the 

 woods, where a whip-poor- \\ill has laid two ^\'hite eggs sci'awled over with 

 hieroglyphics of purple and grey and l)rown. All day the female whip- 

 poor-will broods the eggs. Against the protective l)rowns and gi'eys of 

 the woods floor, the bird is ahnost invisible, but when she flies up like 

 a great moth, the stems of the tall anemones nearby are moved by the 

 flutter of her wings. 



A snail pauses a long time under the anemones. A box turtle moves 

 slowly through the woods and ])auses to scrape a hole in the loose earth 

 in which to lay white eggs. Days come and niglits fome. and by and by 

 it is July and the anemones are out of bloom. The stout leaves still stand 

 and on the ends of the wiry stems are conical bcids of compact seeds, 

 waiting to ripen. 



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